Stone Cold Predictions for the Holiday Season

A lot is riding on the remaining two months of the year as the holiday season continues before it’s wrapped up by New Year. Many companies are pinning their yearly performances on the period, knowing that the fourth quarter is the all and important one for bringing in the money.

And one particularly good projection that favors the upward trend of ecommerce is from a new report from Adobe. Powered by data on Adobe Analytics, which is part of the wider Adobe Experience Cloud that also includes Adobe Advertising and Adobe Experience Manager, the company just released its digital shopping predictions.

Among the analysis of 1,000,000,000,000 (that’s twelve Os, or if you prefer, one trillion) online visits to retail sites, the headline takeaway is this:

Online Holiday Sales Set to Reach $189 billion, Breaking All Previous Records

If these projections are correct then that would represent an increase of 33% from last year’s more usual festive period.

According to the data, sales could even be hitting $2 billion per day until 21 November, and then $3 billion per day from 22 November until 3 December.

And we can zoom in on certain items and how they are expected to perform. Let’s take, for example, smartphones. It’s expected that US consumers will spend $28 billion MORE on smartphones when compared to last year – that’s a spike of 55%. And more importantly, this will make up a whopping 42% of all online sales.

In terms of smaller-sized retailers, many are anticipating big rises in revenue, as much as 107% in fact, whereas larger-sized retailers are expecting highs of 84% in sales growth.

John Copeland, the head of marketing and customer insights at Adobe, weighed in to the data, saying that one of the more surprising factors this year is that “Cyber Week is set to be “Cyber Month”. 

And lastly, if we zoom out of ecommerce and look at commerce more generally, then we can expect quite modest, relatively flat growth for the entire holiday season, as the pandemic continues to channel us towards digital shopping and away from in-store shopping – the latter of which is where the majority of us still shop, and as such the largest chunk of revenue for retailers.

Total holiday sales are set to slowly climb between 1.9% and 2% – that’s much slower than previous years, which have generally grown, on average, 4% over the last 10 years.

So there you have it. Adobe’s expectations for how the holiday season is going to turn out.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Adobe Experience Manager experts. Contact us to see how we can work together.